Interesting prog on Radio 4 'costing the earth a few weeks ago, showed the heavy energy cost of youtube etc, stated that a secondlife avatar had a carbon footprint equivelent to a person in Brazil. Talked of possible enrgy crunch for London data centres, increasingly forced to 'go green' due to lack of power expansion.

East London Data centre planners were told by electricity suppliers to 'come back after the olympics'

Every twitter, Facebook posting and You Tube video viewed has a carbon cost that is becoming increasingly dear, as our use of computers grows exponentionally.

The expanding digital cloud contributes 2 per cent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, about the same as aviation, and it's rising. The high energy demands of the massive data centres needed to store all our information are of growing concern to both the government and industry. But how can they be made greener and more efficient? Costing the Earth investigates.

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All the hardware vendors are gearing up for this, they think that the next big upgrade cycle is to replace energy ineffcient machines with green hardware.

Some of the stuff they are doing is quite interesting the admin will be able to turn off components that they do not use so that there is no power going through those components.

I'm working on a major networking project at the moment that's makes heavy use of virtualisation - it cuts the number of physical servers enormously, and the power that's needed to run the nodes on the network. It has print servers, web servers, application servers, etc. etc. all running on one box instead of several. See Understanding Virtualization for details of how its done.

Imagine what was a room full of servers just running on one box.

Power management will also allow admin to shut down the virtual bits that are currently unused to - honestly it seems close to magic to me!